>It is NOT intuitive and you won't benefit from it immediately.
What? How do you hope to play anything other than basic melodies if you can't read music? You'd have to develop your ear, which is much harder than learning to read music x)
> Especially as piano has different clef for left and right hand... Mostly Because grouchy 18th century old Austrian white males hate you! :-D
It's because the grand staff is centered around middle C.
I play several instruments but can only read music for piano. Guitar, banjo, and harmonica I play entirely by ear or sometimes with some tablature to get started.
Imagine you're 40 years old and you've never played an instrument. You have limited ambition - you want to have fun and play a little bit around campfire. How do you start, let's say on a guitar:
1. I show you G, C, D chords and print out a simple, easily understandable chart you can take home. You now can play hundreds of songs after 30 min lesson and a few mins of practice. You can spend time playing around and slowly learning rhythm, strumming techniques and patterns, while singing to your songs and getting a feel for your instrument. A week or three later I show you E-minor and now you can play virtually every pop song made in last 20 years. [1] If you get excited and interested, we throw in Aminor, and eventually F Major and now you know power chords and you're the master of it all. You're having fun, you're playing, you're improving, and you're having FUN. You can focus on good techniques and sounding good. When and if you want more, we can learn basic music theory and pentatonic patterns, and then one day if you're serious and ready for some pain, you can learn some staff notation.
Or!
2. I give you some books and tell you to learn notes. You download an app or six to enable you to mindlessly practices notes every day. You spend months studying by rote and can maybe play Twinkle Twinkle Little star, poorly. But it's academic because you gave up a long time before you got there as there was no FUN to be had and you have children and work and household chores and this is a poor investment of your precious, precious time.
>>How do you hope to play anything other than basic melodies if you can't read music?
I mean, it's 2021. Look around. We are SPOILED for choices when it comes to learning! There's pianote and flowkey and casio lk line and songsterr and YouTube and tablature and karaoke apps and anything and everything. It's wonderful and we should embrace that every person can learn differently and enjoy themselves! :)
FWIW, I've played Amelie on piano, Green Onions on organ, I want to Break free on synth and made some small synthwave songs entirely from scratch without reading music (but with thorough understanding of what I was playing - keys and changes and transitions and inversions) . I've recorded a cover version of White room including Rhythm and Solo, and now play bass in a 3 piece band, for fun, without needing to read music. Yes I've learned it eventually, but frankly as a 43 year old it's brought no benefit yet in the two years since I've done so.
YES if you are a pro dedicated musician interacting with others you must learn it. But I think a lot of old-school musicians forget or don't want to understand what it's like to be a casual adult player who just wants to have some fun and jam. Empathy is lacking. Just because previous generation went through some enforced painful rite of passage, doesn't mean everybody has to - let's have an actual discussion on specific customized learning path that benefits each person's goals and constraints.
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Second point, I firmly believe, especially for Hacker-News audience, is that learning staff notation too early is counter-productive. It gives enormous undeserved privilege and primacy to C major and it prevents you from making crucial connections early on. In Western 12 note equal temperament, there are 12 notes. That's it, 12 notes, repeating. You can start wherever you want and it's the same. You don't care if you start from C or Bb. There are patterns and intervals and triads and chords and things that sound good that are completely relative and you can learn SO much without staff notation messing you up. Then you do learn staff notation, and you realize it's always lying to you. The spaces on staff notation are not representative to anything in the real world. Between E and F there's one semitone; but between F and G there are two semitones, even though they are the same spacing on the staff. And if you move from the safety of C major to anything else, you are SCREEEEEWED as na adult student wanting to have fun. Notation stops any pretense of sense logic and patterns and it's a quagmire of flats and sharps you're supposed to remember as you painfully make your way through. It takes something beautiful, built on relative patterns, and jams that lovely circle into jagged square hole that's on fire. Yes, eventually, you need to learn the same stupid crippling language everybody else uses, but that's not in any way to say that the language is beautiful or practical or helpful. It's just the notation we're stuck in Western music.
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I think most importantly, a lot of people completely conflate "music theory" with "staff notation".
I've spent a long time reading "Music Theory books" which just want to teach you staff notation, which has zero explanatory powers (and I firmly believe has negative initial explanatory value). Finally, I came upon on this [2] book, which starts with "If you want to learn staff notation, awesome; we have a sibling book for that; but this is a book on music theory which is independent on any specific notation system". I read that book and every page was revelation and insight and made me a better player. Modern motivated geeky interested enthusiastic adults don't have to be stuck in the method that our grandparents taught captive 10 year olds.
I dunno, maybe it'll blow your mind, maybe you cannot see it, but I could discuss dominant 7th and minor harmonics and modes and pentatonics and intervals and triads and augmented & diminished and all that good, meaty, fun, fascinating, geeky stuff with my instructor without needing or referencing staff notation at all.
>>It's because the grand staff is centered around middle C.
That explains precisely nothing. It's not even circular, it's a rote memorized factoid thrown out instead of explanation that can be understood and discussed. The bass and treble are off by two. Two!!! If you truly cannot see that for a student, let alone for anybody, it would've been better if Piano staffs were same notes but one or two straight octaves apart, I feel you're not making an effort to see it from anybody else's eyes. My challenge is to find a practical, discussable reason two hands on same piano are off by two notes on staff that has inherent value and cannot be trivially reduced to "because 18th century grouchy Austrians said so" :)
>>It's by far one of the easiest parts of learning to play an instrument.
Well that's just wrong, but we can agree to STROOOONGLY disagree on this one :P
1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oOlDewpCfZQ
2: https://www.amazon.ca/gp/product/1986061833/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_...
I'd like to add that in 2021 learning writing and reading is counter-productive. Text-to speech and vice versa software is widely available, and spelling rules for English require a ridiculous effort for little benefit except backwards compatibility with legacy books. As an adult learner you are SCREEEEWED even trying to figure out how to pronounce the things written above.
More to the point though, Kids ARE taught speech FIRST (as is my point with an instrument)! They in fact DO learn complex sentences and language patterns and communication way way before we teach them writing. We are not even contemplating teaching 1 year olds writing before we teach them language. So you are 100% making my point for me :).
Similarly in languages, I once went through 2 years of learning foreign language by rote memorization of tenses and rules and declensions and it was awful (this was not in North America) . Got nobody in the class anywhere. 10 A-plus students couldn't make a conversational sentence after 2 years. Much more success is accomplished by teaching people here to speak and understand language first.
And again to address different part of your comment and my point: I claim staff notation for people who WANT to understand patterns and theory In music can be counterproductive. Get the feel for relativity of keys first, before we smash C major up your throat. Alphabets by and large aren't that counterproductive, so it's a bit of a false comparison on that level too, though we can have a good discussion of phonetic alphabets vs whatever the heck English has. Staff notation is not inherently logical and representative of patterns in 12 note equal temperament. It's just an archaic system we are stuck in though others have been proposed. It's qwerty! :)
Through all of this tough, I don't see an actual counter argument - this seems to always get people riled up and upset, But why SHOULD an adult wanting to strum or jam and have some fun, be taught staff notation FIRST? What goal does it accomplish, why is that a beneficial order of operation, other than "that's how I was taught"? Let's have a charitable, productive honest discussion :)
